The Mimic Men: Super 8 and The Trip

In the superheated media run-up to Super 8—there’s been profile after profile hailing the genius of writer-director J. J. Abrams—I kept reading that its script was “original.” And in Hollywoodspeak, this may be accurate: After all, it isn’t a sequel or based on a comic book. Which isn’t to say that Super 8 is original in the sense of being, well, original. Talk about ersatz. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Steven Spielberg (who produced the movie) is currently the most flattered man on earth.

Set in the fictional small town of Lillian, Ohio in 1979, the story centers on young Joe Lamb (the excellent Joel Courtney), who’s recently lost his mother in an industrial accident. Joe keeps himself busy by working on a homemade Super 8 zombie movie—The Case—along with four bickering buddies and a soulful girl, Alice (played by Elle Fanning, the one star of the bunch), whose sweetness comes shaded with melancholy. Out filming one night, they witness a mysterious train wreck, and before they know it, the world gets weird: Dogs disappear, there are strange power surges and failures, and military creeps take over their town. Even as they work to finish their zombie pic, Joe, Alice, and the gang try to figure out what’s going on.

So do we, and for the most part, the movie’s entertaining enough to become a smash hit. The kids are well cast for their movie typicality (the bossy fat one, the shrimpy pyromaniac, et cetera), and they do a nifty job shuttling between put-downs and yowls of terror. As for the script, Abrams was growing up when Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. were released, and he copies them with a skill that would leave a Hong Kong knockoff merchant gasping with envy. Not only does he hit the classic Spielbergian touchstones—the mid-American setting, the fractured family in need of healing, the mistrust of the authorities, and the openness to new, even alien encounters—but the storytelling beats, from the scares to the hugs, are so familiar you could almost dance to them.

Now, it’s not uninteresting that in 2011 a hot Hollywood talent like Abrams, who created Lost and rebooted the Star Trek movie franchise, should make a movie filled with nostalgia for the movies, if not the world, of 1979. Trouble is, he puts no fresh spin on what Spielberg gave us three decades ago. Unlike, say, Quentin Tarantino, who Dumpster-dives into exploitation movies to create something all his own, Abrams remains merely an imitator. But even though he does his best-ever directing, we’d never mistake his work for Spielberg’s. It’s not only that Abrams can’t match the young Steven’s sheer filmmaking gifts (few could), it’s that he lacks his sense of human-scale emotion, his ability to capture the poetry of wonder. Then again, how could he? Close Encounters and E.T. have enchanted generations because to Spielberg they were personal. Their most seductive feelings, including the idealized nostalgia for childhood, came from deep within. For Abrams, those movies—and feelings—are just a template.

You find a far less slavish kind of emulation in The Trip, a funny, vaguely corrupt new road movie (chopped down from a six-part English TV series) that made me laugh harder than anything else I’ve seen this year. Less a story than a pretext, the film follows Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, terrific British comics who are at once friends and rivals, as they wander around northern England eating at Michelin-starred restaurants—the movie tweaks foodie-ism but takes care to plug the places they’re eating—and one-upping each other with jokes and impersonations.

The Trip was directed by Michael Winterbottom, who’s prolific to the point of promiscuity—his 25-plus films include Jude, 24 Hour Party People, and A Mighty Heart—yet he rarely does anything boringly straightforward. In following these two comedians as they play heightened versions of themselves, he’s clearly working the same newfangled fiction-reality blur you find in everything from the books of W. G. Sebald to the antics of Snooki and the Situation. Accurately or not—and it’s probably a bit of both—the happily married Brydon comes off as a very talented, very nice man who’s content to have done so well, while Coogan emerges as an even more talented but much more selfish striver, tormented by the sense that his career-making turn as Alan Partridge—in some of the funniest television shows I’ve ever seen—may be the peak from which he’s now all-too-rapidly descending.

Still, even in our celebrity-mad culture, who really cares whether these guys are happy? Heck, they’re comedians from another country. What makes The Trip so enjoyable is something that harks back to an earlier era, when the movies showcased talent worthy of vaudeville—Charlie Chaplin’s and Buster Keaton’s immaculately polished slapstick, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’s gliding grace, poor Judy Garland sending us over the rainbow. Both Coogan and Brydon are dazzling mimics, and the movie soars when the two show off their competing versions of Michael Caine (both terrific), riff on the voices of 007 (Coogan wins here), or revel in Brydon’s greatest triumph, a vocal shtick called “Small Man in a Box” that’s more uncanny and awe-inspiring than anything in Super 8.